What strikes me is that the motivations discussed are selfish ones, whereas my experience is that most people submit out of an instinct for civic participation: to share the activities of a group with the larger community, and/or to bring community attention to the group’s activities (a nuanced distinction?).

Publicity/glory no doubt play a role, but for the most part I find them to be secondary factors.

Certainly, there are differences between a community weekly and a local blog published by the New York Times, but I’ll offer my two keys for developing and keeping community contributors:

Take whatever they send (within reason, but better to prime the pump by running a less-than-perfect piece than to shut the tap with a rejection); and play up the civic value of their contributions.

I’ve always thought that Rupert Murdoch’s initiative for fee-based content online was a bit hypocritical, since his media enterprises accept citizen journalists’ work without compensating the providers.

Everyone should be compensated for their work, in addition, a simpler way of fining copyright violators should be created. Similar to a jaywalking fine, with a minor fee for our work being stolen from our web sites.

Here’s a link: http://www.contentblog.org/2010/05/11/topic-pages-how-to-avoid-the-race-to-the-bottom/

And if you haven’t already seen it, here’s a great Poynter.org piece on topic pages from Maurreen Skowran:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?aid=179969&id=31